Enlightenment Through Understanding

Social Taxonomy

April 15, 2016

This taxonomy aims to unify these blog posts, as well as certain aspects of society and economics under a hierarchical framework. The idea is that I can classify an article or a blog post somewhere in this taxonomy.

‘discussing economics online’ is filed under ‘expert culture’ even though the topic matter is economics. The debate process itself is separated from the subject.

Some call it ‘virtue signaling’, but a lot of it is intellectualism signaling. ‘Signaling’ is often used pejoratively, but signaling can include any intellectual activity that is public and unpaid. Teaching a math class is not signaling, but answering questions in an online math community is because it’s public and there is no expectation of pay. The reward, rather than money, is a boost in ‘expert status’, which is why this category is the same as ‘expert culture’. In recent years, with the post-2013 SJW-backlash, ‘virtue signaling’ and pandering actually seems to have lost its effectiveness, and people who resort to it tend to be called-out.

‘Naval gazing and introspection’, labels that are often used pejoratively, can include any article about an intellectual topic (coding, wealth inequality, start-ups, etc.) written from a first-person perspective, often with anecdotal evidence. This style can be annoying in its tendency to overgeneralize or ‘lump’ people into simple, reductionist categories (rich vs. poor).

This is contrast to post-structuralists, anarcho-socialists & syndicalists, postmodernists, and anarcho-primitivists, who tend to reject such categorizations and other ‘grand narratives’ for how the world works.